Five Roles in Literature Circles

Speaker 1: Make sure that your sharing as much as possible about those connections you made.
Today started out with a literature circle share out. Each person has two minutes to share, the rest of their team mates are listening and learning. They did all five of their jobs. First job is the summarizer:
"We're going to start out with our summarizers. I'm looking at DeAnjelo, Denashia, Stephanie, George and Jose."
They're in charge of hitting all of the major points in the chapter; first, next, then last kind of thing, so it's like an overview of what happens.
"Two minutes begin now."
Can you then speak about that for two minutes, to four of your peers? It's their time, two minutes. Then can you learn from what somebody else is saying? Because a lot of learning is also listening.
Speaker 2: It describes Wayne in chapter 6 when he came to town.
Speaker 1: The second person, the visualizer, is in charge of picking the best setting of that chapter, so where does the action happen, and why is that setting important?
"Make sure that your sharing for that full two minutes. Go ahead and begin."
They're in charge of pulling out text evidence of what's in the scene and then also drawing a picture of it so that they can also visualize with their mind's eye what's happening in the chapter.
Speaker 1: "Alan, this is great text evidence, okay? I'm glad that is what you pulled out from the chapter."
The third person is our inferencer, so taking what character's say and think and how that impacts who they are as people. Sort of the more in depth analysis of how characters are interacting in the chapter.
Speaker 4: "On page 69, when Yolonda said she was made of fancy pants. She was maybe mad."
Speaker 1: "Did she mean that she had fancy pants?"
Speaker 4: "No."
Speaker 1: "No, what did she doing to her? What do you call it when you say something that sound kind of nice, but you might not mean it to be so nice?"
Speaker 4: "Sarcastic."
Speaker 1: "Maybe sarcastic, right. So was she being nice to her?"
Speaker 4: "No."
Speaker 1: No. What was she being instead, Abel? What was she being?"
Speaker 4: "Bragging?"
Speaker 1: "Yeah. Kind of like bragging, yup. So that's a good example of noticing what they say, but what they actually mean when they say it. Okay? That's a good reference Abel. Go ahead and continue."
The fourth person is in charge of picking out a symbol, they're the symbolizer. Which is basically the big idea or theme of the chapter.
"Go ahead and begin."
Often times people are asked to find the big idea of the book, so we try to practice that with individual chapters.
Speaker 5: "My symbol that I chose was courage because, mine starts with it took a lot of courage because I was afraid."
Speaker 1: "Nice. That's a great connection Nick."
The fifth person is the word detective. They find interesting or tricky or just uncommon words and break them down based on the suffixes and prefixes and their connotation and come up with their own definition based on the context clues in the chapter.
Speaker 6: Page 162, the sentence I have with a tricky word is, "he aim's the nozzle straight up" The content was neutral.
Speaker 1: "Right now your going to read chapter 17 and 18. The jobs have already rotated at the board, okay?"
I found that when they are practising those skills in a really strong way, they get excited about what their doing and when they can understand the story and can then explain it in an engaging way, the rest of their team is more interested in what they have to say.
Speaker 7: "What is his purpose?"
Speaker 8: "His purpose is to show the city."
Speaker 1: You'll see a lot more students sitting up, and listening and leaning in to what student's are saying here at week 3 into the unit, where as the first couple of days it was very quiet.
"Speak a little bit louder so that everyone can hear you okay?"
Speaker 9: "He told me there's not much to answer because he's afraid..."
Speaker 1: So it's been cool to see they're enthusiasm and volume both match as they've gotten stronger at this.

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